Knowledge People Performance

by David Wagner

Position Paper: Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management

Over the past couple of months I worked with a team of people from the German Knowledge Management Association, also called GfWM, Although I don't usually post German language content on my blog, I decided to do so on this occasion as I know that many of my readers are based in Germany. The team consisted of practitioners, consultants and a researcher with each of us bringing slightly different perspectives to the table. This is not a research paper and our intention was not to write one either. Instead, we wanted this piece to be a call on knowledge management professionals to consider the implications of social media on their daily work and the organizations they work in. We believe that the application of Web 2.0 tools within organizations has huge potential to leverage knowledge resources. At the same time, we wanted to stress that becoming an Enterprise 2.0 is not merely a question of making use of social media, but adapting the organizational culture accordingly. In order to make our ideas more 'tangible', we tried to come up with our own definition of the term Enterprise 2.0 (based on Andrew McAfee's work) and identified further characteristics. Additionally, we compared prototypical organizational cultures of an Enterprise 1.0 and an Enterprise 2.0 (based on Edgar Schein's work).

 

Filed under  //   Andrew McAfee   e20   edgar schein   enterprise20   gfwm   km   knowledge management  

Social Media & Organizational Learning: A Lesson

Recently, I co-lectured a number of sessions on Organizational Learning at the University of Nottingham and talked to students on various programs about how organizations leverage exisiting networks and use social media to foster knowledge creation and collaboration. I introduced some of the concepts described in earlier posts, such as Ross Dawson's Social Media Strategy Framework and Brian Solis' Conversation Prism.
 
Furthermore, I tried to embed the aforementioned practitioner models in a more theoretical context. For this purpose, I used the papers by Inkpen & Tsang as well as Nahapiet & Ghoshal. We explored the concept and dimensions of social capital and looked at how the latter may affect knowledge processes within networks.
 
I closed the sessions with a McKinsey survey which presents various tools that are currently used for internal knowledge management. Wikis, Blogs, RSS feeds and Video sharing were the killer applications in this category. I was very pleased with the questions raised during the sessions and the presentations that were produced as a result of my engagement. What a great feeling to inspire other minds. However, this doesn't just work one way. One of the students, who used to be with Pfizer, a pharmaceutical company, shared with us some of the tools and concepts they used at work. This is how we met Jessica a.k.a. Dr. Enterprise 2.0.
 
via mckinseyquarterly.com

Posted May 2, 2010